Manhood in Early Modern England

Honour, Sex and Marriage

Elizabeth A Foyster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884262
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This is the first book to focus on the relationships which men formed with their wives in early modern England, making it an important contribution to a new understanding of English, social, family, and gender history. Dr Foyster redresses the balance of historical research which has largely concentrated on the public lives of prominent men. The book looks at youth and courtship before marriage, male fears of their wives' gossip and sexual betrayal, and male friendships before and after marriage. Highlighted throughout is the importance of sexual reputation. Based on both legal records and fictional sources, this is a fascinating insight into the personal lives of ordinary men and women in early modern England.

Chapter One
Discovering Manhood

Do but consider, pray, what is a man,
till such times as he doth marry.¹

Amongst those worldly Joys, of which
Men equally may have their Share,
Whereof the Poor as well as Rich
most commonly possessors are:
The greatest happiness I find,
Is that which comes from Women kind:
There is no comfort in this life,
Like to a constant loving Wife.²

This is a study of gender history. It takes as its premise that ideas of 'manhood' were as much social and cultural constructions as those of 'femininity'. For ideas about what it meant to be a man, as well as how men experienced their gender, have histories. Gender history, as it has been defined, is above all else relational history. It seeks to examine the sexes not in isolation, but rather the relationships between the sexes. It is concerned with discovering how the desirable qualities and attributes for each gender were defined in relation to each other. It is also a history of power relations. By studying men in the context of marriage, this book will show how power relations could be negotiated and challenged, as well as adopted and accepted. Focusing on evidence from the seventeenth century, attention will be drawn to the importance of men's sexual relationships in the formation of their gender identity, as well as to their subsequent social credit or worth. Whilst at first sight the story of early modern gender relations may appear to be one wholly of dominance and subordination, authority and deference, the study of honour will reveal how the interdependency of the reputations of husbands and wives could moderate these relations. Men were all too aware that their honour depended on the actions and words of their wives.

But why, you may well ask, do we need more histories of men? History by its very definition has long been 'his story': the accounts of the lives of men, and the analysis of writings by men. The resurgence of women's history in the 1960s and 1970s has seen a gradual redressing of the balance, but our knowledge of women's experience in the past is still far from complete. It is a measure of the impact of women's history, however, that it has led to a fundamental questioning of the sources, methods, chronologies and categories which have been traditionally employed by historians. Somewhat ironically, by writing histories of women, historians have also exposed the flaws and limitations of previous histories of men. Nowhere has this been more powerfully shown by historians of women than in the examination of the prescriptive literature of the past which taught how patriarchy, the male domination and subordination of women, could be achieved. Early modern English didactic literature ranging from household conduct books to broadside ballads prescribed specific gender roles to men and women. Women were to be chaste, silent and obedient. Men were to be the heads of households, governing over their wives, children and servants. According to this literature, it was essential to the operation of patriarchy that women were confined to the 'private' sphere of the home and excluded from the male 'public' world. Historians of women have exposed this literature for what it was: an expression of the ideal model of gender relations rather than a reflection of its reality. Today it leaves us with evidence of the theory rather than the practice of patriarchy. As Keith Wrightson has concluded from his study of early modern marriage, 'the picture which emerges indicates the private existence of a strong complementary and companionate ethos, side by side with, and often overshadowing, theoretical adherence to the doctrine of male authority and public female subordina tion'.³ In practice, women were able to negotiate their relationships with men and with other women so that their history was not always one of subordination. Instead of reading the advice contained within this literature as evidence of actual women's lives, histories of women have shown how little it could tally with the everyday realities of practical living. Research has revealed that the 'separate spheres' ideology had little relevance to many early modern women. Women from all social groups frequently entered the 'public' sphere, and the 'private' or domestic sphere was rarely completely cut off or isolated from the public world.⁴

It is in the light of this research into women's lives that the inadequacies of our knowledge of men's history become most obvious. For too long historians have assumed that the public lives of men were all that mattered. The private lives of men in the home as sons, husbands and fathers have been forgotten. This is a costly omission, for how will we ever understand how and why patriarchy could endure unless we study men from this perspective? Judith Bennett has called for research on patriarchy to be at the top of research agendas for women's history; we also need to concentrate on the study of patriarchy if we are to understand more about men's lives. Patriarchal ideas are not transhistorical; notions of how men could gain power over women have changed over time and have had different implications depending on the personal, familial or institutional context in which they have been applied.⁵ Yet fundamental questions about how men set about achieving dominance over women remain unanswered in the histories that have been written. We need to have a clearer understanding of how individual men in the past shaped patriarchal ideas to suit their needs, and when their behaviour could contest or challenge patriarchy as the dominant ideology. Men may have appeared to have the most to gain from the operation of patriarchy, but what did the ideal of patriarchy mean for the reality of men's lives? This book will demonstrate the importance that power over women had in the formation of a man's identity. But by profoundly affecting men's personal relationships, this book will also argue that the patriarchal ideal had costs for men's as well as women's lives.

Gender Roles and Responsibilities

Patriarchal ideas gained a new force in the seventeenth century, even though by this period they were ages old. Political theorists such as Sir Robert Filmer drew analogies between the power of the king in the state and that of the father in the family. This analogy was extended by royalists when they argued that the contract between a king and his subjects was as irrevocable as the marriage contract between husband and wife. By the end of the seventeenth century the political theory of patriarchy was being challenged by John Locke, but by this time its implications for domestic conduct had become the mainstay of household manuals. Puritan ministers had ensured that patriarchal ideas reached a wider audience when they adopted and adapted them within their sermons and writings on household conduct. For these authors, patriarchy also had a scriptural basis and justification. It was because of Eve's sin that God had made woman subordinate to man. Drawing upon Ephesians 5:21-33 they compared the husband's position over his wife with that of Christ over the Church. William Gouge, one of the most influential of these conduct book writers, quoted verse 22, 'wives submit yourselves unto your divine husbands, as unto the Lord', and verse 23, 'for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church', to explain why women should be subordinate to their husbands. For Puritans, the ordering of the family had both spiritual and political significance: 'the family is a seminary of the Church and Commonwealth', Gouge declared.⁶ Men's role as head of the household was so important that it was regarded as an indicator of the ability to govern in the public world outside. As we shall see, in seventeenth-century thinking there was no separation of spheres for men. It was integral to their privilege as the dominant sex that they should be free to move between the spheres, but it was also a test of their manhood that in both they should prove equally capable of managing their affairs. As John Dod and Robert Cleaver explained in the conduct book they wrote in 1612, 'it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house'.⁷

This patriarchal system was thus a powerful ideology in early modern England which set out notions of appropriate gender roles for both men and women. Whilst for men, as well as women, the patriarchal model of gender relations could remain an ideal pattern that few would achieve in its entirety, as this book will argue, that did not prevent men from attempting to achieve that ideal. Many men adopted particular patterns of behaviour within the household, and within their marital relationships, which they believed would bring them closer to obtaining dominance over women. As we shall see, in the seventeenth century the key to male power in the household was thought to be sexual control of women as well as the self. 'Hegemonic masculinity', as defined by the sociologist R.W. Connell, is the dominant form of masculinity 'which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy'. In the early modern period it was by obtaining and maintaining exclusive heterosexual marital relationships that men believed they would come closest to reaching the patriarchal goal. Although many men failed in their bid for sexual exclusivity, some never attempted to gain power in this way, and others gave up trying, that did not detract from the dominance of the hegemonic form. Instead it created 'subordinate masculinities' to which some men were relegated.⁸ As John Tosh, a leading historian of nineteenth-century masculinity, has explained, men who belonged to these subordinate groups were those 'whose crime is that they undermine patriarchy from within or discredit it in the eyes of women. Sometimes an entire persona is demonized ... sometimes specific forms of male behaviour are singled out.'⁹ In early modern England, as in the nineteenth century, sodomy between men was abhorred.¹⁰ Amongst heterosexual men, as will be shown, the label of 'cuckold' was attached to those whose lack of sexual dominance had led their wives to adultery. A range of rituals were employed by communities throughout the country to mock and humiliate cuckolds as failures.

The early modern period is a particularly exciting one for the historian because it is so rich in sources in which ordinary men and women speak about their gender, sexual activities and marriages. We can see how abstract notions like 'patriarchy' were put into practice and became tangible realities. Going to the church courts to fight defamation or marriage separation suits, litigants and witnesses spoke and were questioned about the values they attached to a range of male and female behaviours. The term 'manhood' will be used in this book, rather than 'masculinity', since the latter was only employed by contemporaries from the mid-eighteenth century. The language of 'honour' was how men and women talked about their gender roles. By examining the use of this language we can measure the bearing that prescriptive codes had on actual behaviour. From these records we can see how honour, reputation, credit, or a good name could be the rewards for men and women who upheld the ideals of patriarchy. The insults of 'whore' and 'cuckold' were targeted against those who did not direct their relationships towards this ideal. The ideology of patriarchy thus led to the construction of a system of morality which rewarded or chastised those who succeeded or failed to live up to its requirements. The records of marital separation, however, show the difficulties of putting the patriarchal system into place, as well as the costs that could be incurred within marital relationships in the process. Nowhere did the adoption of gender roles appear to have been as straightforward as the authors of prescriptive literature suggested, instead they were open to contest and debate. But the large and increasing numbers of men and women who went to the church courts to defend their good names in this period, in addition to the mass of popular literature which took sexual honour as its theme, should convince us of the overwhelming contemporary interest in and concern with the value of honour earned in this way.

Historians of church court records, in particular Jim Sharpe and Martin Ingram, have analysed the legal processes and thinking which lay behind the production of these records, as well as providing us with the details of their contents.¹¹ Nobody has done more to increase our understanding of church court records from a gender perspective, however, than Laura Gowing. Her important book, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London, has given us a vivid insight into the world of female gossip and slander and has set the study of early modern women on to new and exciting directions.¹² Although this book will suggest alternative interpretations and arguments to those of Gowing since it is a study of early modern men, it will also suggest points of comparison. The work of academics in other disciplines has also confirmed the importance of the concept of honour to early modern thinking. C.L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Discovering Manhood
• 2. Constructing Manhood
• 3. Asserting Manhood
• 4. Lost Manhood
• 5. Restoring Manhood
• 6. Conclusion: Continuity and change in early modern manhood
• Further Reading
• Index